Ronald Reagan at his Inaugural in 1980 said, “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” We painfully know where this sort of thinking takes us.

I find the repeated assertion that Bernie and the left won the ideological struggle in the course of the presidential primary problematic. Bernie shifted the conversation in the primaries for sure. But he also lost big, far bigger than he did in 2016. Thus the assertion of ideological victory should be qualified and complicated. Unless it is, it strikes me as an example of our ideological hopes getting ahead of a far more complex reality. Such a mode of thinking is understandable in some ways, but it won’t get us a flea hop closer to a just, egalitarian, and sustainable society.

Long term structural conditions in the African American community and the larger society, themselves the result and manifestation of racism, combine with a pandemic to produce disproportionately high death rates among Black Americans. Racism never sleeps.

The idea that if there is no floor fight over the rules and platform, the Democratic Party convention will be hollow and no more than a vanity project showcasing the likely nominee Joe Biden is about as egregious an example of small circle thinking as I can think of. It misses the overarching importance of Democrats — President Obama, Michelle Obama, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Julian Castro, and Joe Biden and his Vice Presidential running mate to name a few — laying out their case against Trump and the Republican Party, while making a case for Biden and other Democrats down the ticket to a television audience of tens of millions.

I joined a video conference recently, discussing strategy in a global pandemic. It included some prominent people on the left. The conversation was insightful in many ways, revealing some dimensions of the pandemic that don’t find their way into most discussions.

But missing in this dialogue were three things. One was an articulation of the political-social constituencies that have to be assembled and the main democratic tasks that have to be addressed, if the country is to escape this pandemic and move to higher ground. Another was the urgency of the fall elections. Only one speaker gave this existential struggle the kind of attention that it deserves. Four more years of Trump would be a catastrophe of a higher order of magnitude than what we are experiencing now. Finally, the necessity of unity of an expansive and diverse movement didn’t find itself at the core of the conversation. I would like to say I’m surprised, but these silences are more common than I care to think.